Weekend Words: Vacant
"Every time I appoint someone to a vacant position, I make a hundred unhappy and one ungrateful."
On Wednesday, Senator Mitch McConnell declared there isn’t “a snowball’s chance in hell” that he will consider any nomination to fill the vacant Supreme Court seat until the 45th president takes over.
Every time I appoint someone to a vacant position, I make a hundred unhappy and one ungrateful.
—Louis XIV
I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries; as long as they are chiefly agricultural; and this will be as long as there shall be vacant lands in any part of America. When they get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe.
—Thomas Jefferson
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
—William Wordsworth, “I wandered lonely as a cloud”
Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for — in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.
—Ellen Goodman
O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant.
—T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets “East Coker”
The watchdog’s voice that bayed the whisp’ring wind,
And the loud laugh that spoke the vacant mind.
—Oliver Goldsmith, “The Deserted Village”
If you leave the smallest quarter of your head vacant for a moment, other people’s opinions will rush in from all quarters.
—George Bernard Shaw
A vacant mind invites dangerous inmates, as a deserted mansion tempts wandering outcasts to enter and take up their abode in its desolate apartments.
—Nicholas Hilliard
Absence of occupation is not rest,
A mind quite vacant is a mind distressed.
—William Cowper, “Retirement”
